Overdue receivables are the pile of invoices Russian companies have failed to pay each other on time. It sounds like a narrow accounting detail, but the monitor treats it as harder to repaint than a price or ratio. The figure is state-published, but it comes from corporate reporting rather than a government press release. The monitor calls it transmission in money terms: financial stress moving through the private economy, visible in unpaid invoices.
How the number is built
Rosstat's monthly economic report gives the total stock of overdue invoices across Russian companies. That figure is deflated by the same consumer-price index used elsewhere on this monitor into 2021 prices, so it can be read as a real multiple of its pre-war level rather than a nominal ruble total that inflation alone would inflate over time. The reading is then expressed as a multiple of its January 2022 level.
Where the anchors come from
100 marks the January 2022 level, measured in 2021 prices. 0 marks twice that level in real terms. Both were fixed before any reading; the reasoning is on the methodology page.
Why it is harder to repaint
The figure aggregates what companies report about unpaid invoices; it is not a single official's summary judgment. Alongside rail freight, it belongs to the state-published class of physical or self-evident quantities. That does not make either series immune to management, but it gives the pair a different role from prices and ratios, which only confirm a trigger.
What a rising pile means
A growing stock of unpaid invoices records financial stress moving through the private economy as companies pay each other late or not at all. It does not identify the cause, the firms or sectors under strain, or predict business failures on its own. What it adds to the monitor is a money-based reading drawn from corporate reporting, while remaining a state-published series.